The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) consist of a spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by a triad of behavioral and cognitive impairments including impaired social interaction, self-control and learning. Most of the children with ASD who have normal intelligence (often referred to as “high-functioning children with ASD”) are studying in normal schools. Although these children have normal intelligence, they often demonstrated learning difficulties in school. One of the reasons affecting their learning is the memory impairment associated with ASD. The present study examined the verbal memory profile using information processing model and its relation to organizational strategies in high-functioning (Hi-AUT) and low-functioning (Lo-AUT) children with autism. Twenty-two Hi-AUT and 16 Lo-AUT, and 22 age-, gender- and handedness matched normal children (NC) were required to remember a list of semantically related words for immediate and delayed recall and recognition. All autistic children showed impaired free recall, a reduced discrimination score and an elevated false alarm rate at recognition. While Hi-AUT children showed encoding and retrieval deficit, Lo-AUT children demonstrated more severe encoding problem and an additional retention difficulty. The effect of repetition on Hi-AUT was comparable to NC, but that for Lo-AUT seemed to be less effective. Finally, Hi-AUT children only showed subtle inefficiency in clustering skills to facilitate their memory as normal children did, whereas Lo-AUT children showed impaired semantic clustering. These findings have provided some new understanding of the verbal memory profile of High- and Low-functioning autistic children and its association with the underlying memory strategy. These may provide insights into future exploration of the applicability of external semantic cues and repetitive learning to enhance the verbal memory functioning of autistic children.